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AIRPORTS 


WAR SERVICES 
of the 


Department of Commerce 
Washington;, D: C. 




















FROM PEACE 

It is the American tradition to build for peaceful 
commerce instead of for war, but to so build 
our public facilities—particularly those feder¬ 
ally created or aided—that they can be con¬ 
verted quickly and easily to military use when 
the national safety is imperiled. 

The coming of war in 1941 challenged many 
Federal agencies to prove the validity of this 
policy. But because of the air readiness of 
both Germany and Japan, none faced a sterner 
challenge than the Civil Aeronautics Adminis¬ 
tration of the Department of Commerce. 

The CAA had been charged by Congress with 
developing and promoting civil aeronautics. 

It had built and was operating the Nation's 
34,000-mile system of airways—the lighted and 
radio-protected network of "aerial highways." 
Its experts had guided and counseled the cities, 
counties, and States in how and where airports 
should be built. Its engineers and inspectors 
had tested the soundness of all civil airplanes 
and the competency of all pilots. It was con¬ 
ducting a large program for the flight training 
of our college youth. It had also launched a 
far-flung educational program for "air con¬ 
ditioning" American high school boys and 
girls. 

When we entered the war the CAA was em¬ 
ploying 6,000 men and 2,000 women, almost 
all of the former trained aeronautical tech¬ 
nicians. This organization has been con¬ 
verted to military use with remarkable com¬ 
pleteness and speed. CAA activities have 
been geared so closely to the expressed needs 
of the Army and Navy that: 

Seventeen of every 20 airplanes guided along 
the "aerial highways” by CAA's navigation 
aids and traffic men are military aircraft. 



TO WAR 


Crews of expert CAA technicians are building 
airways for the Army Air Forces in foreign lands. 

More than 500 airports—all certified as essen¬ 
tial to national defense by the Secretaries of 
War and Navy—are being built or improved 
from CAA funds. 

CAA technical experts on aircraft design and 
maintenance are supervising the construction 
of sensational new cargo planes for Army and 
Navy. 

CAA's War Training Service is giving tens of 
thousands of Army and Navy personnel pilot 
training through the system of colleges and com¬ 
mercial flying schools which it supervises. 

Hundreds of Army and Navy men are being 
trained as airport and airway traffic controllers 
in CAA schools. 

14,000 American high schools have adopted the 
preflight program of education in aviation sub¬ 
jects sponsored by the CAA, the U. S. Office of 
Education, and the War and Navy Departments. 

Putting American aviation on a war basis is 
requiring an enormous expansion in man¬ 
power as well as in equipment. Literally 
millions of untrained men must be turned into 
pilots, mechanics, and technicians in a rela¬ 
tively short space of time. 

The Civil Aeronautics Administration as a 
trained and experienced civilian organization 
can make the most efficient possible use of its 
relatively small numbers of personnel. By 
providing technical services it relieves the 
Army and the Navy Air Forces of a personnel 
problem and permits them to concentrate their 
efforts on the military phases of this aviation 
war. 


William 

Special Aviation Assistant to the 

Secretary of Commerce. 





AIRWAYS 


More than 3,000 CAA employees are en¬ 
gaged in building, maintaining, and operating 
the Nation's 34,000-mile aerial highway and 
traffic system, the Federal Airways. 

These "aerial highways" are merely lanes 
of air 20 miles wide, leading from airport to 
airport along the most practical routes between 
key cities. At first they were marked only by 
beacon lights for night flights. Then radio 
"beams" and other guide signals were added, 
to provide definite flight paths by day or night. 
(New type "ultra-high-frequency" radio signals, 
more reliable in bad weather, now are being 
substituted progressively for the older type.) 
Newest facility is the complete "blind-landing" 
system with which aircraft can be landed on a 
completely fog-bound airport. 

Total mileage of United States airways has 
increased over 700 percent since 1927, and 
almost 100 percent since 1932. Spaced along 
this travel network the CAA operates more 
than 600 radio signal stations of various types, 
2,300 beacon lights and 318 lighted interme¬ 
diate (emergency) landing fields. 

When an airliner full of priority passengers 
or an Army bomber being ferried, to a war 
theater rides the airways, its pilots are served 
in flight not only by these CAA facilities, but 
by numerous others. More than 450 weather- 



This is the 34,000-mile system of Federal Airways. 





TRAFFIC, TREBLED, IS 85 % MILITARY 

Each Symbol = 2,500,000 Aircraft Operations 


1940 




1941 



1942 



9,200,000 


White = Civilian 


Black = Military 


reporting stations keep pilots informed over a 
55,000-mile teletype system. Twenty-three air¬ 
ways traffic control centers keep constant 
check on its progress in relation to other planes 
in flight, using 45,000 miles of teletype and 
telephone circuits. And at 74 of the Nation's 
busiest airports it is even guided to earth by 
CAA men in the control towers. 

If these services were important before the 
war (while United States airlines were compil¬ 
ing the world's greatest safety and performance 
records in aviation history) imagine their 
importance to the war effort now. Airway 
traffic is three times what it was last year. 
Seventeen out of twenty airplanes which fly the 
Federal Airways are Army or Navy craft. 

Air defenders of the Aleutians have been 
aided by the fine new Alaskan airways sys¬ 
tem, most of which was built by the CAA during 
1941-42. At the request of the United States 
armed forces, the CAA airways organization is 
building vital new airways in numerous foreign 
lands. And five new super-power CAA ultra¬ 
high-frequency radio stations, strategically 
located, now can reach Uncle Sam's aircraft 
anywhere on the globe. 

Fighting squadrons on foreign fronts need 
trained traffic experts of their own. The CAA 
not only is training its own replacements; it 
also is conducting seven schools for Army and 
Navy traffic control personnel. 




AIRPORTS 

CAA airport experts long have led the 
fight to give the Nation an adequate system 
of landing fields. Pioneers in all-weather 
runways and airport lighting, their early 
developments were limited to "intermediate 
landing fields" along the Federal Airways. 
Hundreds of these early fields have been taken 
over by local authorities, further improved and 
are now part of the Nation's airport system. 
The CAA has guided and counseled city, 
county, and State governments as to how and 
where local airports should be built, a service 
of particular importance during the work-relief 
and public-works programs of the 1930's, when 
$270,000,000 was invested by Federal and 
local governments in landing facilities. 

In 1939, the CAA reported to Congress (at 
its request) that the country's 2,300 airports 
should be increased to 3,500 in the next 6 
years, with particular emphasis on the larger- 
type fields. 

In 1940 it revised this need, on the basis of 
world conditions, to urge a total of 4,000 fields, 
stressing particularly the need for major air¬ 
ports in the interest of national defense and 
proposing a $600,000,000 program in the next 
3 to 6 years. It requested $80,000,000 for 
the immediate launching of a program which 
would be limited solely to landing facilities, 
omitting buildings and other refinements. 

Congress thereupon made its first direct 
appropriation ($40,000,000) to the CAA for 
airport improvements, limiting them to sites 
rated as preferentially important by the armed 
forces. All airports built since have been 
certified as essential to the war effort by the 
Secretaries of War, Navy, and Commerce. 

These construction projects are being 
carried out in any of four ways: (1) by com¬ 
mercial contract, with engineering and super¬ 
vision by the Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army; 
(2) by commercial contract, with engineering 
and supervision by the Bureau of Yards and 



MAJOR U. S. AIRPORTS* UP ELEVENFOLD 

Each Symbol = 200 Fields 





1943 


\c 


71 




CAA PROJECTS (418) 


865 


‘Minimum: Paved runways 3,500 feet or longer (class 3 airports or better). 
Total excludes certain military airdromes. 


Docks, U. S. Navy; (3) by commercial contract 
with engineering and supervision by the CAA 
Airways Engineering Division; (4) by supple¬ 
mental aid to an existing WPA airport project, 
a method terminated with the closing out of 
the WPA. 

When the CAA received its first modest 
airport appropriation, a little over 2 years 
ago, there were in all the United States only 76 
"major" airports—i. e., fields having paved 
runways of 3,500 feet or longer, the types 
needed by heavy, fast military aircraft. 

By next July 1, these will have been in¬ 
creased elevenfold to more than 850 such 
fields, plus a confidential number of purely 
military airdromes. And more than half of 
these new major fields (418) are being devel¬ 
oped under the CAA program, which now 
totals approximately $400,000,000 for the 
3-year period. Pace of the new work may 
be judged from the fact that the $40,000,000 
authorized late in 1940 was increased by 
$160,000,000 in 1941 and $200,000,000 in 
1942. 

In addition to serving Uncle Sam's "war 
birds/' this new network of heavy-duty fields 
will be a vital factor in (he post-war expansion 
of civil air transport. 














ILm PILOT TRAINING 

The CAA War Training Service, formerly 
Civilian Pilot Training, has given wings to 
nearly 100,000 new civilian pilots in its first 4 
years. 

Planned in 1938 and launched in 1939, 
it offered Federal aid to able-bodied youth of 
college age who wished to learn to fly. This 
aid was offered to colleges and accredited 
commercial flying schools which would "team 
up" to give ground study and flight training 
respectively, as specified by the CAA. 

The plan was so promptly and widely 
accepted that the training was given at 545 
locations, in 1939, and at more than 900 in 
1940, with additional hundreds of communities 
on the waiting list. Air training thus having 
been taken to the Nation's crossroads, one 
objective was realized when the number of 
United States civilian pilots increased more 
than fourfold in 3 years. In the same period 
the number of civilian airplanes owned by 
Americans went up from 10,000 to 25,000. 

In those years, the whole process of learn¬ 
ing to fly was revolutionized. The CAA 
produced and published standard textbooks 
for its courses, checked all flight instructors for 
proficiency, and gave "refresher" courses to 
thousands of pilots whose performance did 
not meet required teaching standards. 

The first year's output of 10,000 light-plane 
pilots was achieved with only one fatal acci¬ 
dent. Thereafter, the program continued to 
set all-time records of air safety. 

In its early years the program was very 
important to women, 2,600 girl pilots having 
been trained up to mid-1941, when pressure of 
excess male students above quotas forced 
temporary exclusion of women from the courses. 

Skeptics had argued, at the outset, that it 
would be dangerous to entrust the flight train¬ 
ing to local flying schools, many of which were 
somewhat haphazard, hand-to-mouth enter¬ 
prises. But the CAA felt that, under proper 











UP WENT THE NUMBER OF FLYERS 

Each Symbol = 20,000 Pilots 

•• ft i 

-ft ft 

-ft ft ft ft 

-ftftftftfti 

104,876 


supervision, the wealth of experience and 
"know-how" in these schools was an asset 
possessed by no other group in the country. 
And the way in which this confidence was justi¬ 
fied by the school operators will mark for many 
years a milestone in aviation development. 

Looking back after 2 years of war prep¬ 
aration, the greatest contribution of the pilot 
training program to war needs appears to have 
been its opportune timing. It got under way 
early, because it was civilian in character. 
Thus it could move out ahead of United States 
military expansion, test methods of mass train¬ 
ing, develop standards of performance. 

The use of colleges and universities for 
specialized training, now approved for war 
training of many types, was widely tested under 
the CAA plan; and it proved so satisfactory 
that before Pearl Harbor, aviation ground- 
school work had become an accredited study in 
some 600 United States colleges. 

The delegation of flight training to com¬ 
mercial flying-schools by Federal contract was 
tested on an unprecedented scale. 

The Army and Navy urged the CAA, from 
the outset, to produce a large staff of civilian 
flight instructors. First, all instructors were 
tested. Those who fell short were given "re¬ 
freshers." Thousands of other commercial 

• > 


•> % » i 




YEAR BY YEAR, C.A.A. PILOT TRAINING 

ELEMENTARY Each Symbol = 

10,000 courses 


AftftlO 

AM 


Restricted Military Information 


pilots were enrolled in "refresher" courses and 
sharpened into instructors. By 1941 the CAA 
had extended and matured its own training 
until it was producing thousands of full-fledged 
commercial pilot-instructors from boys who had 
made their first "puddle-jumper" hop in its 
elementary course. 

Thus was built, in the 2 years before 
this Nation faced war, a huge roster of "air 
teachers" who by 1942 were to compose over 
two-thirds of the country's total strength in 
trained flight instructors. 

Up to 1941, CAA trainees—most of them 
college students—were under no military 
obligation whatever. In 1941, however, new 
trainees were asked to sign a pledge to enter 
Army or Navy aviation when needed; and by 
the middle of that year—5 months before 
Pearl Harbor—they were enlisting in the Air 
Services at the rate of 1,000 per month. 

Another step toward correlation with the 
armed forces was taken in mid-1942, when all 
CAA trainees were required to be enlisted, 
in advance, in Army or Naval Reserve. The 
Services administered this ruling differently. 
The Army asked the CAA to recruit its own 
trainees, whereas the Navy chose to sign up 
trainees and assign them to CAA schools. 
The ban on enlistments, while temporarily 
affecting the CAA's work for the Army, had 



1940 


1941 


1942 


1943 





HAS BEEN ADAPTED TO CURRENT NEEDS 


INSTRUCTOR CROSS INSTRU- FLIGHT 
SECONDARY REFRESHER COUNTRY MEN I LINK OFFICER 



little effect on its program for the Navy, which 
(although the figures are confidential) is large 
in scope and definite in character. In fact, 
the Navy puts all its pilot candidates through 
a certain amount of CAA training prior to 
beginning naval flight training. 

Before the war the CAA did not train 
military pilots; it merely taught healthy young 
Americans how to fly an airplane. But almost 
every day the war news mentions some lad 
who took his first hop in a CAA "puddle- 
jumper" course before the war; often not very 
long before, either. Such boys made up two- 
thirds of the RAF's late American Eagle 
Squadron. There were 17 of them among the 
79 airmen who bombed Tokyo with Doolittle. 
One-third of the Navy's Fighting Squadron 
Six, which downed 27 Jap planes in the 
Solomons, began as CAA students. 

As operating today, the CAA program 
includes—in addition to the Navy's pre¬ 
combat courses—an unprecedented number of 
brief light-plane courses for the Army for 
screening and preselection purposes, as well 
as the more advanced courses which produce 
for the Army non-combat airmen such as flight 
instructors and ferry or transport pilots. All 
trainees are members of the armed forces, to 
whose needs the entire program is rigidly 
fitted. 


> > 
> > » 


> » ' 












PREFLIGHT TRAINING 

A committee of educators, requested by the 
CAA to survey air education in the United States 
high schools, reported ruefully in 1941 that most 
of our schools had failed even to attempt what 
German education had done with ruthless, pains¬ 
taking thoroughness: i. e., dramatize for teen-age 
youth the new world created by the airplane. 

The CAA then joined with the U. S. Office 
of Education, supported by both the Army and 
the Navy, to develop aviation training in the pri¬ 
mary and secondary schools. At two centers—■ 
Nebraska and Columbia Universities—geogra¬ 
phers, historians, mathematicians, biologists, 
and many other specialists worked out study 
courses in which aviation is given up-to-date 
emphasis. For example, they bring out its effect 
on our conception of time and space, and thus 
upon all international relations. 

A series of regional conferences with State 
and local school officials, early in 1942, indi¬ 
cated immediate and general desire to coop¬ 
erate. Special manuals for teachers and 
basic textbooks for pupils were rushed to com¬ 
pletion. Emergency plans were made to in¬ 
clude thousands of high school teachers in the 
ground school phase of the CAA's college 
courses. By the opening of the school year 
in September 1942, 20 texts and manuals 
were available on all the principal subjects re¬ 
lated to "The Air Age"—geography, mathemat¬ 
ics, biology, meteorology, physical science, etc. 

Today a quarter of a million young Amer¬ 
icans, from 16 to 18, are taking preflight 
training in more than 14,000 high schools. 

The preflight courses in many high schools 
should equip their graduates to pass without 
further study the CAA ground school examina¬ 
tion required to obtain a private pilot certif¬ 
icate. Carrying this idea a step further, the 
CAA is doing experimental work with light- 
plane flight courses for high school students 
at 22 high schools throughout the country. 
It also is continuing research in the develop¬ 
ment of teaching materials, the training of 
qualified teachers, and the presentation of the 
program to school officials not yet participating. 




ft* 


ORIGIN 
OF TRAINEES 





JL JL JL JL 


^ \ h 


Each Symbol = - IO 
Pilots or 
Technicians 



INTER-AMERICAN 

TRAINING 



A hemispheric air-training program bring¬ 
ing nearly 500 air-minded young men of the 
other American republics to the United States 
for flight, mechanics, or engineering study was 
begun late in 1941. All of the 224 student 
technicians and 182 of the student pilots were 
trained under CAA supervision or contract, 
the remaining 78 pilots receiving Army Air 
Force courses. Other governmental agencies 
active in the program, because of its Good 
Neighbor significance, included the Defense 
Supplies Corporation which provided the funds, 
the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American 
Affairs and the State Department. 


The five types of training given—commer¬ 
cial and military flying, service mechanic, 
instructor mechanic, and aeronautical engi¬ 
neer—anticipate that the trainees will become 
key aviation men in their home countries. 




AIR SCIENCE 

Air Safety is a vital factor in peace or 
war. CAA inspectors and engineers play a 
major peacetime role in checking and testing 
new types of aircraft at the factories, requiring 
proper upkeep of all airplanes in use, testing 
* all pilots and technicians for competence and 
sponsoring new technical developments to 
reduce the hazards of flying. 

Today, at the request of the Army and 
Navy, CAA engineers and technicians check 
designs and performance of many types of non¬ 
combat military aircraft, such as troop and 
cargo carriers, training ships, gliders, and 
auxiliary craft. 

CAA inspectors help the war-loaded 
commercial air lines to maintain their high 
safety standards. Others enforce proper qual¬ 
ity levels in technical training schools and 
investigate accidents. 

CAA air research in the laboratories of 
dozens of United States colleges is making 
notable contributions to aviation knowledge in 
such fields as standardization of methods for 
flight instruction and pre-selection of likely pilot 
material. Study of the many and confusing 
technical terms in which instructors speak to 
their students has produced a pilot's "patter" 
manual which lists the minimum number of 
necessary terms for this work—terms which 
have been proved the ones most easily and 
generally understood. This manual was adapt¬ 
ed by the Services to their own use. 

What instructors actually say to students 
during flight was transcribed and played back 
for study, revealing weaknesses and variations 
in teaching practices. A means of measuring 
mechanically the competence of a pilot in flight 
has been developed, by taking "movies" of an 
instrument panel in the airplane. 

The value of being able to pre-select men 
likely to become good military pilots is obvious 
today. But back in mid-1941, the CAA's work in 
developing scientific yardsticks for pre-selec¬ 
tion had "exceeded the results of the previous 
25 years in this field," according to the Navy's 
Comdr. J. R. Poppin. 






These are going to fly for the Navy. 

—Official U. S. Navy Photograph. 


TRAINED MANPOWER 

The Nation has been learning, these past 
2 years, what a task it is to produce masses of 
technically trained men quickly. Yet nowhere 
in the vast manpower tug-of-war has the 
problem been more acute than in aviation. 

Aviation evolved slowly for over 30 years; 
it had no need for mass production, in the 
Detroit sense. Then, suddenly, nothing else 
was so badly needed. The CAA's mass pilot 
training was 2 full years ahead of the 
general about-face. Fortunately, the CAA also 
had become the world's largest user of radio 
communications, and had developed a large 
force of trained radio men; it also possessed, in 
its inspectors and engineers, a sizable group 
of men highly trained in all aspects of aircraft 
structures and flight operations. Most of these 



And these for the Army. 


> > 

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> > 1 








Women are learning many important aviation jobs, such 
as how to control airport traffic from the “tower." This i 
is one of seven CAA schools which train experts in air 
traffic for the Army, the Navy, and the CAA itself. 

men are young, in line with their craft. Liter- * 
ally thousands of them have gone to key posi¬ 
tions in the armed forces or in war industry. 


At the same time, the training and replace¬ 
ment of these very heavy losses in personnel has 
kept the CAA in a position to handle, as an 
organization, special wartime problems related 
to aviation which otherwise would add greatly 
to the burden of the Air Services. 



Trained CAA experts on air observation 
(seasoned at early Army maneuvers) now sit 
with Army and Navy men at strategic Informa- 


More than 250,000 young Americans are taking preflight 
aeronautics at 14,000 high schools. 





< <, 
t l < 


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«!**■ 



Th esc, after taking CAA advanced courses, became trans¬ 
port pilots with the airlines. 


tion Centers, checking the identity of all planes 
in flight. More than 150 CAA medical ex¬ 
aminers are in the armed forces, and 50 CAA- 
trained psychologists now give "screening" 
tests for Army and Navy pilot candidates. 

The entire level of flight, ground and pre¬ 
flight training has been lifted and stabilized 
by production of more than a score of text¬ 
books; by the improvement and seasoning of 
thousands of college and high school teachers, 
flight instructors, and aircraft technicians; and 
by the introduction of aviation study into the 
Nation's regular educational system. Hundreds 
of flying school operators, also, got their first 
large-scale experience through the CAA, and 
many of them now hold Army training con¬ 
tracts. 



These Navy enlisted men became skilled airways traffic 
controllers at one of the CAA schools. 











FROM WAR 

No matter how burdened it may be in doing its 
part in a war for survival, the Civil Aero¬ 
nautics Administration must find means to 
plan how it can best meet the enormous post¬ 
war responsibilities which will be its natural 
inheritance. 

The aviation industry of the United States 
produced an incredible $6,400,000,000 worth 
of products in 1942, ranking second only to 
steel, and far surpassing the value of the out¬ 
put of the automotive industry in its greatest 
prewar year. Each year the war continues, 
aviation production will increase. 

The 1942 aircraft production was over 
eleven times that of 1940 and fifty times that 
of 1938. The 1943 schedule calls for more 
than triple that of 1942, indicating the power 
of new plant capacity just coming into pro¬ 
duction. Over a million trained workers are 
involved. 

The post-war task of any Federal agency 
charged with responsibility toward civil avia¬ 
tion development is to adopt policies and plans 
which will help utilize as much of this vast 
war-necessary industry as possible. 

The war is multiplying many times the number 
of trained pilots, navigators, mechanics, radio, 
and other air technicians. Their chance for 
useful peacetime employment in this field—and 
the Nation's chance for a major post-war 
economic "lift" from this great and newly 
vitalized industry—rests, in considerable de¬ 
gree, on sound public policies toward aero¬ 
nautical development. 

So, as the CAA rapidly expands the Nation's 
airways facilities, builds hundreds of airports, 
speeds manifold technical development and 
pushes the training of various types of airmen 
in response to the immediate demands of war, 
it must endeavor to look through and beyond 
the war clouds in the immediate foreground 
to view and appraise the post-war needs over 
the horizon in skies of peace. 



TO PEACE 

With the release from the armed forces of 
hundreds of thousands of trained airmen the 
manpower to operate the product of the ex¬ 
panded aircraft industry is assured. The 
many-fold expansion of scheduled air carriers 
is beyond doubt. Yet the most optimistic 
estimate of the increase in this field does not 
envision volume which will require more than 
a very minor portion of our productive capac¬ 
ity. The field of miscellaneous commercial 
operations which already was commencing to 
utilize important numbers of aircraft before 
the war will, no doubt, expand greatly, but 
even at the most generous estimate, will require 
but another small fraction of output. So it is 
to the development in the field of private flying 
and individual ownership that we must look 
for major utilization. 

This would parallel experience in the auto¬ 
motive field between the two world convulsions. 
Passenger cars, mainly for private use, bulk 
about four-fifths of normal motor vehicle output. 

America acquired the designation "a nation 
on wheels" following the last world war. It is 
inescapable that America must earn the 
designation, "a nation on wings" if it is to reap 
the economical and social benefits of its 
magnificent war-inspired aeronautical effort 
and, more important, inspire a lasting peace 
by unassailable air strength. 

Germany taught the world the airplane's 
vital role in conquest and mass murder. 
America's task will be to demonstrate to a 
war-weary human race the airway to peaceful 
commerce, speedy and pleasant travel, inspir¬ 
ing recreation, and international good will. 

Chari es I. Stanton, 

Administrator of Civil Aeronautics. 


U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE S 1943 10-33325~1 









■ I 




































































































































































































































































































































